Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesig...
In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by an...
Technology has given us this wonderful opportunity to have low energy costs. We have to seize that, rather than keep debating and discussing and fighting over it.
I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.
Stephen Daldry would be a director that I would love to work with as well as Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, and I'm very lucky to have worked with Isabel Coixet, who is also one of my favourite directors.
I had this idea for a while to do mix this Al Green vibe with a samba thing. I tried to do that in many different ways. Peter added his own modern notion of funk and his own deep background in classical music.
Three of my children are medical doctors, they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew, but they don't know much more about soul than he did.
As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn't get 'Cabin Fever' made that fast I thought I'd failed.
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.
If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?
The fact that a Republican is in the late Senator Kennedy's old seat probably must have him rolling in his grave, probably spilling his drink.
When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.
In fact Sarah Palin has created more jobs than Obama has. She created eleven jobs fact-checking at the AP just for the Palin autobiography.
In investing, we intuitively think we should make a number of small bets. A blockbuster strategy is the opposite. It means making fewer huge investments. But it turns out to be safer.
Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs.
Cutting taxes for very high income people an average of more than $100,000 a year for people that make more than a million dollars a year is not an effective way to get the economy going.
It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.
We know there are a lot of people in the unemployment pool that do not match up in their skill set for what jobs are going to be created, and that's an area we've got to keep pressing on.
